Nuevo myths
4th February 2012
"A myth is a religion in which no one any longer believes." ~ Feibleman, James
Introduction
This article is an attempt to explore some aspects of "Tango Nuevo" dancing, in advance of the Tango Nuevo workshop in March 2012.
The boring bit - some definitions
Unfortunately, sometimes we have to label things. So, for the sake of clarity, I'll describe what I mean by "nuevo" and "traditional".
Traditional: dancing in close embrace to traditional music. Movements based around the step, with a strict progression along the line-of-dance.
Nuevo: dancing in a flexible / open embrace, to non-traditional music. Movements based around the pivot, with less emphasis on line-of-dance and more emphasis on "360-degree awareness" for floorcraft.
Note: I make no attempt to defend my definitions - they're simply shorthand terms for types of dance behaviour.
So, that's got that out of the way.
The myth of musicality
There's a certain reputation nuevo dancers have, of simply repeating sequences ad nauseam, regardless of the music. For such a stereotypical nuevo dancer, one can imagine watching him / her dance to multiple different tracks, but basically not vary the movements for each track.
Whereas, apparently, traditional tango dancers are musical geniuses, varying the subtlety of their musical interpretation to each instrument, and delicately creating performance art with each step.
Funnily enough, neither of these are true. There's plenty of traditional dancers who literally cannot walk to the basic beat - or who only walk to the beat, marching straight through any pauses in their way. And there's lots of nuevo dancers who have genius interpretation, who employ a wide range of movements to interpret music. I've seen examples of both.
A little grain of truth
All that out of the way... I genuinely do believe that different Tango dance styles (and different embraces / music in Tango will create differences in style) will have different restrictions and benefits. I mean, otherwise they'd hardly be different styles, would they?
So, there is, I think, something to be said for the argument that musicality is less "natural" to a nuevo dancer than a traditional one.
In traditional, you can easily make changes in a very short amount of time - basically, on each step, you have a range of possibilities. This happens all the time - if you do a weight transfer, you can then do a side / back / forward step, or another wieight transfer. Similarly, you can take as long or a short a time to do these movements as you want. To take an extreme example, if you want to take 10 seconds to shift weight, you can do so. If you wanted to do 4 weight transfers in a second, you can do that too. So you have a lot of flexibility, at all times, in the movements you can make, and in the tempo of these movements. This flexibility allows you to adapt your movements any way you want to the music. In fact, it encourages you to do so.
Conversely, in nuevo, you tend to find things are more "pattern-based". Most things are either patterns or "embedded" in a pattern (i.e. they require specific patterns to get into or out of them). ocho is a pattern. A giro is a pattern. Volcadas and sacadas require patterns to work. And so on.
Whilst this doesn't mean musicality is impossible, it starts making things more difficult. Patterns generally have longer "footprints" than steps - you can't do a giro in 1 second, no matter how you try. Similarly, if you rush a volcada, you're likely to fall over. So it's more difficult to match these longer segments to appropriate parts of the music. You can, of course, develop specific patterns to specific sets of music, over time. But that's not musicality, that's rehearsing a performance.
In my view, you only start to truly develop musicality in nuevo movements when you can start to put improvised motions together (in the same way as you can in traditional). For example, mixing a giro with a barrida into an enganche, all in a same movement, and all done in an improvised manner. And that tends to be more difficult, given the nature of the movements.
So I think there's some truth in the musicality argument. A grain, anyway.
The myth of floorcraft
"The more I practice, the luckier I seem to get" ~ every successful person, everywhere
"Negracha's. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious." ~ Obi-Wan Kenobi
So, the floorcraft downstairs at Negracha's (a nuevo room in a London milonga) has come in from a lot of stick over the past few years. Often from us.
But here's the thing. The floorcraft upstairs isn't that great either. It may well be more a characteristic of central London venues (short version: lots of strangers = less of a community) rather than a characteristic of a nuevo floor. And in addition, I've also found that the better I get, the easier floorcraft becomes.
Another grain
But, again, we encounter a grain of truth amongst the myths.
Floorcraft in nuevo is different - it has to be, given that (by definition), nuevo dancing is pivot-based. Because it's a little difficult to walk along in a straight line-of-dance whilst pivotting.
So there will be "wobbles" - people will wander back and forth along the line of dance, to a degree. So perhaps we need a different view of what floorcraft conventions apply to a 100% nuevo dance floor, rather than a rigid line-of-dance adherence.
Again - you can see where this concept came from. You can see why it came. You can even see that it has a certain justification. The problem is when the grain of truth gets expanded into a whole mountains-worth of stereotyping.
Other "myth" articles
I've done a few other "The myth of..." articles - here's a selection of earlier ones.
~ David Bailey, 4th February 2012